Over the past 25 years, the Gates foundation has given away more than $100bn. Much of that money has gone to healthcare and education projects outside the US – and the organisation plans to give $200bn more to various programmes in the next twenty years. But as Elon Musk and Doge feed USAID, a key partner of the foundation, “into the wood chipper,” how can Bill Gates press ahead? The FT’s Africa editor, David Pilling, speaks to Gates about running an apolitical, philanthropic entity in a politically challenging time.

Read more:

Bill Gates is giving away $200bn. Can his plans survive in the Trump era?

Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of ‘killing’ children with USAID cuts

Elon Musk’s painful departure

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Presented by David Pilling. Produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval. Flo Phillips is the executive producer. Original music and sound design by Breen Turner. The FT’s acting co-head of audio is Manuela Saragosa.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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The US dollar has been in slow decline for around a decade – so says Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard professor, and former chief economist of the IMF. Donald Trump’s trade policies have raised a lot of questions about the future of the dollar – and how its decline could affect the rest of the world’s currencies. Rogoff joins Martin Wolf to discuss how the decline of the dollar could empower China, capital flight from the US, and why cryptocurrency is a bigger threat to dollar hegemony than most people realise.

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. You can find his column here: https://www.ft.com/martin-wolf 

Subscribe to The Economics Show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen. 

Presented by Martin Wolf. Produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound design by Breen Turner. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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Almost a month since ‘liberation day’, the potential impacts of President Donald Trump’s tariff regime are starting to sink in. US hard data isn’t yet showing much negative impact from changes to US trade policy – but economists are gloomy on US growth prospects. The IMF last week warned of an increased risk of US recession, and lopped nearly a full percentage point off its forecast for US growth this year. Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, joins FT economics editor Sam Fleming to discuss how Trump’s tariff agenda may play out, which forces could force the president to change tack, and what that might look like.

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When China joined the World Trade Organization at the start of this century, its surging exports rattled US manufacturing. Prices fell, jobs became less lucrative, and communities that relied on these jobs were hit hard. President Donald Trump seems determined to bring those jobs back to the US. Is that realistic or even desirable? The FT’s chief economics commentator Martin Wolf speaks to MIT economics professor David Autor about the "China shock" and the (potentially more significant) AI challenge that lies ahead.

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Former Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King has never shied away from expressing his opinion. Here, he sits down with his friend Martin Wolf — the FT’s chief economics commentator — to discuss some of the thorniest problems central banks now face: Will rate-setters manage to stay independent in the era of Trump 2.0? What should they do about cryptocurrencies? And how can they regain credibility after getting inflation so wrong?

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. You can find his column here

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Presented by Martin Wolf. Produced by Laurence Knight. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music by Breen Turner. Audio mix by Simon Panayi. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.

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As Donald Trump declares a trade war on the rest of the world, it’s time to learn about a field of economic research known as “weaponised interdependence”. The bad news is that the US president’s weapon of choice – imposing tariffs on goods imports – is a fairly outdated tool of economic warfare. Globalisation and advances in financial and communications technology have created an arsenal of additional weapons, which may yet be fired off by the US or by other big players such as China and the EU. To find out more, the FT’s Alan Beattie speaks to the leading world expert on weaponised interdependence, Abraham Newman, professor of political science at Georgetown University, and co-author with Henry Farrell of 'Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.' Newman warns that Europe, in particular, needs to completely change its gameplan in response to this new world of dominance relationships.

Presented by Alan Beattie. Produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and Laurence Knight. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music by Breen Turner. Audio mix by Simon Panayi. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. 

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For the past few years, Germany has begun to look like the ‘sick man of Europe’ again. Its economy has barely grown since 2019, while its famous manufacturing sector has shrivelled. But earlier this month, financial markets were buoyed by a vote in the German parliament to relax the constitutional limit on government borrowing, the so-called debt brake. It means that Germany’s likely new conservative-led coalition government will be free to borrow unlimited amounts to fund a defence sector build-up, and can also draw on a €500bn fund to spend on infrastructure over the next 10 years. But will more government spending be enough to address Germany’s structural economic problems? The FT’s Martin Sandbu speaks to economist Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California, Berkeley, who is a member of the German Council of Economics Experts, which evaluates the government’s economic policies.

Martin Sandbu writes a regular column for the Financial Times, which you can find here. It includes recent columns on Berlin’s about-turn on debt spending, and the economic choice facing Germany.

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Presented by Martin Sandbu. Produced by Laurence Knight. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Audio mix and original music by Breen Turner. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. 

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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The UK’s Labour government had already inherited a tricky fiscal situation when it came to power last July. But since then, growth has stagnated, borrowing costs have risen, and now the government has committed to a big increase in defence spending. Where will the money come from? The FT’s Sam Fleming interviews Paul Johnson, the long-time director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent think-tank that has been adjudicating the UK’s public finances for more than half a century. As Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves prepares to deliver her Spring Statement on Wednesday, should she break her government’s pledge not to raise personal taxes?

Sam Fleming is the FT’s economics editor. You can find his latest features and columns here.

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Modern industrial economies were made possible by automation and mass production, but also by something similar going on inside the world of management. Where once all the decisions were made by an identifiable boss, now they are farmed out to rule books, bureaucracies and computer algorithms — and nobody is individually accountable for them. The FT’s Andrew Hill speaks to Dan Davies, economist and author of The Unaccountability Machine, who explains how the industrialisation of management decision-making was inevitable in our increasingly complex world but has had unforeseen consequences, such as “accountability sinks” and the rise of populist politicians. Nonetheless, there are solutions, including AI, the 1950s management theory of cybernetics and the return of the much-maligned middle manager.

Andrew Hill is senior business writer at the Financial Times and consulting editor at FT Live. You can find his latest features and columns here, and enjoy his Big Read on the woes of America’s industrial giants here.

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Presented by Andrew Hill. Produced by Edith Rousselot and Laurence Knight. The editor is Bryant Urstadt. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Audio mix and original music by Breen Turner. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. 

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After decades of double-digit growth, China's economy has been expanding at less than half that since the pandemic. A property market crash, youth unemployment and now a trade war with the US are all adding to the country’s woes. So has the Chinese juggernaut finally run out of gas? Martin Wolf speaks to Keyu Jin, a Chinese economist who has lived and worked most of her life in the US and UK, and is currently a professor with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, as well as at Harvard. She says that China remains widely misunderstood in the west.

Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. You can find his column here

Subscribe to The Economics Show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen.

Presented by Martin Wolf. Produced by Laurence Knight. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Audio mix and original music by Breen Turner. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. 

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.